The Chinese government has sealed off the town of Ziketan after at least a dozen residents were infected with pneumonic plague. The disease is a close cousin of the bubonic plague, or the Black Death, which swept Europe in the fourteenth century and is still not extinct, as Joan Acocella wrote in 2005.
While raging epidemics tend to attract outsized media attention, more routine scourges cause worse damage, as James Surowiecki explained in 2003:
At least in economic terms, epidemics are much less destructive than endemic diseases like malaria and tuberculosis, which afflict hundreds of millions of people in the developing world. Epidemics may have a kind of dark glamour, but it’s the old workaday diseases that do the real harm.
Unlike epidemics, endemic diseases—diseases that are more or less permanently established in a region—eat away, day after day, at an economy’s foundations. Sick people miss work more often than healthy people, and are less effective when they show up. People are less likely to invest in things that yield long-term benefits—like education—because they imagine they won’t be around to reap those benefits. Parents often have more children as a kind of insurance policy, which makes it harder for them to feed and care for each child. Sick and hungry children have a harder time in school. Finally, countries where disease is endemic have a harder time attracting foreign investment, not only because their workers are less productive but also because foreign companies are less inclined to do business in places that might prove fatal to foreign managers.
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